Introducing LXQt

A test release of LXQT was announced a few days ago, so I decided to take a look. From the project page:

LXQt is the Qt port and the upcoming version of LXDE, the Lightweight Desktop Environment. It is the product of the merge between the LXDE-Qt and the Razor-qt projects: A lightweight, modular, blazing-fast and user-friendly desktop environment.

The announcement that I saw, was for the siduction version. So I downloaded the iso, wrote it to a USB, and booted it up as a live USB version. There are also repos for installing in other systems (see the project page). There’s a short thread about installing on opensuse, though I have not tested that.

First looks

The live USB booted up quite smoothly. It is only for 64-bit systems at present, though I assume that there will be a 32-bit version in the future. The siduction live media appears to be for legacy (MBR) booting only, so I had to allow legacy booting on the UEFI box where I tested this. The computer where I am trying this uses Intel graphics with a 1440×900 display.

Based on first appearances, the desktop seems to work pretty well. I already prefer it to the gtk2 version of LXDE that I have on my opensuse 13.1 systems.

I have not yet done much testing. I opened a terminal session (Qterminal) to look around. Later I tried “xterm” instead of Qterminal. The system looks very normal at the terminal, and the few commands that I tried all worked.

Next, I decided to play some music. I loaded the file manager (PCManFM), and browsed to a samba share on my network. Clicking on a music file brought up VLC, which played the mp3 file without problem. Later, I tried right clicking on the mp3 file, and going to the “open with” menu. That gave me a choice between VLC and Clementine. I selected Clementine, which also play the music without problems. I’ll note that the choice of Clementine is presumably due to siduction. If you install LXQt on an opensuse machine, you might finish up with a different choice of audio players.

I have not done much else, as yet. This post was mainly an introduction to something that you might want to take for a test drive.